About Effects

T-HFND-010-001

When creating a scene, rigging a character or once your animation is finished, you can add effects such as blurs, glows, shadows, colour filters and transparency filters and to enhance your project's quality. Effects change the way layers or groups of layers are rendered in your scene.

Effects are special types of layers that you can add to your scene's structure. For an effect layer to work, it must be connected as the child of a drawing, a group, or another effect. Effects only alter the element that they are connected to. This gives you flexibility in deciding which elements of your scene are affected by an effect.

Some effects need to be linked to another layer, referred to as a matte layer, which is used to define the area they should affect. The most basic example of this is the Cutter effect. Alone, a cutter effect has no impact on the drawing it is connected to. Once combined with a matte layer, the Cutter effect cuts the shape of the matte out of the drawing.

A matte layer is simply a regular drawing layer that is connected to an effect as its matte. The effect takes the shape of the drawing in the matte layer to determine the area of the drawing it affects. The colours and details in the matte layer are ignored by the effect, only its shape is taken in account.

In the Timeline view, an effect must be rigged as the child of the drawing layer or group it is meant to affect.

If the effect can use a matte layer, it will have a Matte parameter when you expand its parameters list. You can drag and drop the layer you want to use a matte for your effect onto the Matte parameter of your effect to link them.

If the effect can use a matte layer, it will have a matte port on its left to which the matte layer can be connected.

Once your effect is connected, you can adjust its parameters by selecting it, then adjusting its parameters using the Layer Properties view. You can also double-click on the layer to open its Layer Properties dialog. If desired, you can even animate the parameters of your effect by converting their values to functions.